Top prosecutors quit after Justice Department orders end to corruption case against NYC Mayor Adams
Last edited Thu Feb 13, 2025, 06:00 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: AP
Updated 4:22 PM EST, February 13, 2025
NEW YORK (AP) — The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan resigned Thursday after refusing a Justice Department order to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Two senior Justice Department officials also quit after the department leadership in Washington moved to seize control of the case.
Danielle Sassoon, a Republican serving as interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced her resignation in an email to her staff. The move was confirmed by a spokesperson for the office. Adams’ case has yet to be dropped.
After Sassoon declined to dismiss the case, the department’s public integrity section in Washington was asked to take over, according to a person familiar with the matter. Two senior officials who oversee the unit, including the acting chief, resigned in response, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
The exits came days after a high-ranking Justice Department official directed federal prosecutors in New York to end the case against Adams, a Democrat who was accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions and bribes of free or discounted travel from people who wanted to buy his influence. He has pleaded not guilty.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd
Article updated.
Original article/headline -
Updated 2:29 PM EST, February 13, 2025
NEW YORK (AP) — The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan resigned Thursday rather than obey a Justice Department order to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The resignation of Danielle Sassoon, a Republican who was the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was confirmed by a spokesperson for the office.
Her resignation came days after a senior Justice Department official directed New York prosecutors to drop the case against Adams, who was accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions and bribes of free or discounted travel from people who wanted to buy his influence.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said in a memo Monday that the case should be dismissed so that Adams, a Democrat, could help with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and campaign for reelection. Justice Department officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro. A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately respond.
The Justice Department’s decision to end the case because of political considerations, rather than the strength or weakness of the evidence, alarmed some career prosecutors who said it was a departure from longstanding norms.
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Danielle Sassoon, AUSA for SDNY, exits court in NYC on 5 Oct 2023. (Photo: Stephanie Keith / Bloomberg / Getty Images)
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is questioned by prosecutor Danielle Sassoon during his fraud trial over the collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, before US District Judge Lewis Kaplan at federal court in NYC. (Sketch: Jane Rosenberg / Reuters)
... but she was only temporary anyway. They already had plans to replace her with a white male MAGA toady.
It's shocking that the Justice Department is saying the quiet part out loud - this is how they're getting cooperation from Mayor Adams in the vital area of deporting the unwanted immigrants. It's just a tit-for-tat deal.
As far as MAGAs are concerned, Adams' hanky-panky with $100K in campaign donations is "nuthin' man."
The Trump Justice Department, saying the quiet part out loud.
The interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and two officials with the federal public integrity unit all quit after the Justice Department ordered the charges against Mayor Eric Adams to be dropped.
Danielle Sassoon’s departure from the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office came days after she was ordered to drop the case against the mayor. Kent Nishimura for The New York Times
By William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser, Jonah E. Bromwich and Maggie Haberman
Feb. 13, 2025
Updated 3:53 p.m. ET
Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned just days after she was ordered to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor. ... Then, when Justice Department officials sought to transfer the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption cases, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. ... The resignations represent the most high-profile public resistance so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department.
The departures of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and the officials who oversee the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, came in rapid succession on Thursday. Days earlier, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department had ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams.
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The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political. The No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.
Mr. Bove, in accepting Ms. Sassoon’s resignation, informed her that the prosecutors who worked on the case were being placed on administrative leave, and would be investigated by the attorney general and the Justice Department’s internal investigative arm. He told Ms. Sassoon both bodies would also evaluate her conduct. ... He wrote he had accepted her resignation “based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”
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Although the office is part of the Justice Department — there are 93 U.S. attorney’s offices around the country — the Southern District has a reputation for guarding its independence and fending off interference from Washington, winning it the nickname “the Sovereign District.” ... Ms. Sassoon, 38, joined the Southern District in 2016. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.
{snip}
Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush and Jan Ransom contributed reporting.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York. More about William K. Rashbaum
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly. More about Benjamin Weiser
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state criminal courts in Manhattan. More about Jonah E. Bromwich
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent, reporting on the second, nonconsecutive term of Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
lawyers of SDNY to prove how sham Bove is.
( Nicolle is all over this today. Weissman just pointed out that Gov Hochul can even remove Adams, given the case Sassoon summarizes against him, and which he's admitted to before the current judge.
And now Lisa Rubin points out that the DOJ has actually directly yanked this case from SDNY. )
Federal prosecutors may not consider a potential defendant’s “political associations,activities, or beliefs.” Id. § 9-27.260; see also Wayte v. United States, 470 U.S. 598, 608 (1985)(politically motivated prosecutions violate the Constitution). If a criminal prosecution cannot be used to punish political activity, it likewise cannot be used to induce or coerce such activity.Threatening criminal prosecution even to gain an advantage in civil litigation is considered misconduct for an attorney. See, e.g., D.C. Bar Ethics Opinion 339; ABA Criminal JusticeStandard 3-1.6 (“A prosecutor should not use other improper considerations, such as partisan or political or personal considerations, in exercising prosecutorial discretion.”). In your words, “the Department of Justice will not tolerate abuses of the criminal justice process, coercive behavior, or other forms of misconduct.” Dismissal of the indictment for no other reason than to influenceAdams’s mayoral decision-making would be all three.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/letter-to-bondi.html
Off the top, this looks like a hot mess of political lies, denials, and legal intrigue.
A judge cannot drop a legitimate case just because the defendant (Adams) is now bribing trump
Link to tweet
